Marean Curtis W
Institute of Human Origins, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, PO Box 872402, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-2402, USA.
J Hum Evol. 2014 Dec;77:17-40. doi: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2014.02.025.
The systematic exploitation of marine foods by terrestrial mammals lacking aquatic morphologies is rare. Widespread ethnographic and archaeological evidence from many areas of the world shows that modern humans living on coastlines often ratchet up the use of marine foods and develop social and technological characteristics unusual to hunter-gatherers and more consistent with small scale food producing societies. Consistent use of marine resources often is associated with reduced mobility, larger group size, population packing, smaller territories, complex technologies, increased economic and social differentiation, and more intense and wide-ranging gifting and exchange. The commitment to temporally and spatially predictable and dense coastal foods stimulates investment in boundary defense resulting in inter-group conflict as predicted by theory and documented by ethnography. Inter-group conflict provides an ideal context for the proliferation of intra-group cooperative behaviors beneficial to the group but not to the altruist (Bowles, 2009). The origins of this coastal adaptation marks a transformative point for the hominin lineage in Africa since all previous adaptive systems were likely characterized by highly mobile, low-density, egalitarian populations with large territories and little boundary defense. It is important to separate occasional uses of marine foods, present among several primate species, from systematic and committed coastal adaptations. This paper provides a critical review of where and when systematic use of coastal resources and coastal adaptations appeared in the Old World by a comparison of the records from Africa and Europe. It is found that during the Middle Stone Age in South Africa there is evidence that true coastal adaptations developed while there is, so far, a lack of evidence for even the lowest levels of systematic coastal resource use by Neanderthals in Europe. Differences in preservation, sample size, and productivity between these regions do not explain the pattern.
缺乏水生形态的陆生哺乳动物对海洋食物进行系统开发的情况很少见。来自世界许多地区广泛的人种学和考古学证据表明，生活在海岸线上的现代人类常常加大对海洋食物的利用，并发展出一些对于狩猎采集者来说不寻常的社会和技术特征，这些特征更符合小规模食物生产社会。持续利用海洋资源往往与行动能力下降、群体规模增大、人口密集、领地缩小、技术复杂、经济和社会分化加剧以及更频繁广泛的礼物赠送和交换有关。对在时间和空间上可预测且丰富的沿海食物的依赖，刺激了对边界防御的投入，从而导致群体间冲突，这正如理论所预测且人种学所记载的那样。群体间冲突为群体内合作行为的扩散提供了理想环境，这些行为对群体有益但对利他主义者不利（鲍尔斯，2009年）。这种沿海适应的起源标志着非洲人科动物谱系的一个变革点，因为此前所有的适应系统可能都具有高度流动、低密度、平等主义的人口，拥有大片领地且几乎没有边界防御。将几种灵长类物种偶尔食用海洋食物的情况与系统且深入的沿海适应区分开来很重要。本文通过比较非洲和欧洲的记录，对旧世界中沿海资源的系统利用和沿海适应出现的地点和时间进行了批判性回顾。研究发现，在南非的中石器时代有证据表明真正的沿海适应已经发展起来，而到目前为止，欧洲的尼安德特人甚至连最低程度的系统沿海资源利用都缺乏证据。这些地区在保存、样本规模和生产力方面的差异并不能解释这种模式。
